THEATER REVIEW

THEATER REVIEW; No-Good Dad Whose Tale Is Told Repeatedly

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: September 25, 2001

They are, to be truthful, as few and random as summer's last fireflies. But every now and then sparks of theatrical magic light up the dim landscape of ''The Late Henry Moss,'' Sam Shepard's new play at the Signature Theater Company. And for those fleeting moments the dark, anxious and uncertain world outside doesn't exist at all.

At such moments you remember gratefully that playwrights of fierce imagination can indeed work this transporting sorcery even when their own attitudes to life are definitely dark and anxious. And so there you are grinning away at the audacity of the image of a voluptuous woman in a bathtub holding a dead fish as a lure to catch weak men or at the pointed language of forgetfulness that is always spoken by reunited family members in Shepard Land.

The grin, unfortunately, doesn't linger in ''The Late Henry Moss,'' which opened last night under the direction of Joseph Chaikin with a cast led by Ethan Hawke. A popular hit in San Francisco last year, in a staging by Mr. Shepard packed with two-fisted marquee names (Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson), the play itself is long, plodding and diminishingly crowded with echoes from stronger Shepard works.

The title character here is dear old destructive Dad, a seedy, hard-drinking figure who has shown up in many of Mr. Shepard's plays, both in the unwashed flesh (''Buried Child,'' ''Fool for Love'') and as the son-warping center of memorably spun anecdotes (''True West'').

''Henry Moss'' is Mr. Shepard's most earnest and direct attempt to pin down this festering paternal ghost and to find the attendant filial guilt and responsibility. The results suggest that Mr. Shepard, of all people, may be ripe for a guest spot on ''Oprah.''

The play is part of the 10th-anniversary celebration of Signature, the essential Manhattan theater company that devotes itself to exploring the lesser-known works of eminent American dramatists. For Shepard scholars and hard-core fans (count me among them), ''Henry Moss'' has its value. It explains itself in ways that Mr. Shepard's plays seldom do, moving inexorably to that big moment of self-confrontation regularly found in dysfunction-of-the-week television movies.

Yet the overall effect isn't half as illuminating as that of Mr. Shepard's more seemingly obscure works. His singular gift has been for building mysteries out of the ordinary ingredients of American family life, in which home becomes less a place to rediscover than to lose your identity.

This remains a theme in ''Henry Moss,'' and the evening begins tantalizingly as the brothers Ray (Mr. Hawke) and Earl (Arliss Howard) swap clashing memories with a whiskey bottle between them and their father's corpse on a metal-frame bed just behind them. It's a classic Shepard setup, posing the question of who really owns the past.

Normally his answer is that no one does, that history and memory keep shifting on us. Here there seems to be one incontrovertible reality that Ray has spent his life fleeing. And we have cottoned on to what that is so early that the staggered series of stories and flashbacks in which we get to meet old Henry (Guy Boyd) feels like a slow dance of 700 veils. This is a play that keeps pressing for answers by having characters ask questions like ''Would you mind going through the whole story for me one more time?''

That line is spoken by Ray, and it more or less sums up his character. The younger of the brothers, Ray is a hostile interrogator of anyone who knows anything about the last days of his father's life in a bare-bones shack in the the desert of New Mexico. (The quintessentially Shepardesque set is by Christine Jones.)

That includes Earl, who says he found the body; the solicitous next-door neighbor, Esteban (Jose Perez); and the logorrheic taxi driver (Clark Middleton), who took Henry on a fatal fishing trip. His companion on that expedition was a stormy sensualist named Conchalla Lupina (Sheila Tousey), and, boy, are we glad she's around.

Ms. Tousey has a bizarrely anachronistic role, that of woman as both life giver and life taker. But the part benefits from being written from Mr. Shepard's willful befuddlement with women, and he has fun with his own incomprehension. And Ms. Tousey has a field day plowing robustly through this idea of a rocky earth goddess.

None of the men have located similarly secure handles on their characters, and Mr. Chaikin hasn't given them a classic Shepard-style wrestling match production in which they could lose themselves in adrenaline. Mr. Hawke, who showed he can play dumb with wit and intelligence in a recent revival of ''Camino Real,'' has a couple of funny bits in which Ray trips on his own ingenuousness. But it's a tiresome part, in which a man becomes a combination of Gestapo interrogator and psychiatrist to his own brother.

Mr. Howard, whose Earl at least gets the chance to fall apart, fares better, and the evening's few genuinely disturbing moments belong to him. But for ''Henry Moss'' to work at all, you have to believe in the dominating menace of its title character, and Mr. Boyd plays him as a Jackie Gleason-style drunk. He is merely pathetic, which may be Mr. Shepard's point, but the production shouldn't give it away so early.

Over the past decade Mr. Shepard has forsaken the experimental forms with which he made his name in favor of more conventional, rigidly structured narratives. But in so doing he has tamed and fenced in an imagination that was born to run wild. ''Henry Moss'' has just enough glimmers of perversity to suggest that this freer spirit, the sort of authentically original American voice that is so much to be cherished right now, is still somewhere inside Mr. Shepard. It's time to let it loose again.